In a recent episode of his podcast The Magnificent Others, Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan weighed in on the state of rock music and offered a theory on why he believes the genre isn’t as popular as it once was.
“I think, and I will say it overtly, I think that rock has been purposely dialed down in the culture,” Corgan said, noting that he thinks this began in the late ‘90s.
“Again, this gets ‘wizard behind the curtain,’ right? Somebody’s gonna say, ‘Well, how do you know? Who was the wizard behind the curtain?’ All I know is I saw the gravity shift.”
He continued: “If you were at MTV, or around MTV in 1997 or 1998, suddenly they decided rock was out when rock was still very, very high up in the thing. And it was replaced by rap… Their standards and practices immediately shifted, so now things that weren’t allowed were suddenly allowed. People were waving guns. Some people assert that the CIA was involved in all that. Again, above my pay grade. But, I saw it happen. I did witness it happen.
“And of course, great music came out of it, so it’s not a barren wasteland where something was pushed in that replaced something. Qualitative things and great artists came in, but there was this overt shift. I saw it happen. And then now, rap seems to be waning in terms of its cultural influence. Pop is completely dominant. Rock is probably the most dominant ticket-selling thing in the Western world, and yet there’s almost no representation of rock in culture. So, why do we have that schism? I think they purposely dialed down the ability of rock stars to have a voice in the culture.”
